The customer

Valor Co., Ltd. currently has approximately 590 retail locations based in the Tokai and Hokuriku regions, predominantly supermarkets, home improvement centers and drugstores. From 2011, Valor developed a five year growth plan focused on aggressive store opening with an operating revenue goal of 500 billion yen. From 2012 into 2013, it enhanced store sales capacity and infrastructure. In November 2012, it established a 33,000m2(approx.) dry goods center (normal temperature distribution center) in Kani City, Gifu Prefecture. In rapid succession, it opened the Shizuoka Distribution Center in July 2013, a chilled goods center (low temperature, refrigerated distribution center) in Kani in August, a meat packing processing center in August, and a fresh produce center for processing agricultural produce in September. By centralizing work that had conventionally been performed at individual stores, and doing collective batch distribution from the centers to the stores, work at the stores was reduced and quality was stabilized.

The challenge

Valor has many retail stores, such as supermarkets, and wanted to improve its ordering performance to reduce operating costs and increase competitiveness.

The solution

By combining Fujitsu Cloud IaaS Trusted Public S5 (TPS5) and Hadoop, the store inventory calculation process was removed from the core system, making batch processing faster.